9/11 Commission to Release Updated Recommendations Ten Years After First Report

9/11 Commission to Release Updated Recommendations Ten Years After First Report
Commissioners will convene for public event in Washington on July 22
PR Newswire
July 9, 2014 4:36 PM

WASHINGTON, July 9, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, former 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, former Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton and other commission members will release a new report on the 10th anniversary of the original 9/11 Commission report. The new report will examine the nation's current threats, homeland security challenges, successes and innovations; and the difficult questions and oversight obstacles presently facing policymakers.

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The event will take place at the Newseum on Tuesday, July 22, at 9:00AM. The speakers and a full agenda are listed below. The event is open to the press, but space is limited and registration is required. Please RSVP here.

Some information about the 9/11 Commission which gets defenders of the official fairytale in a frothing tizzy, is the litany of super-critical comments that a large proportion of the senior members of the "Commission" have said about their own inquiry, including the two co-chairs: Here's a sample list I compiled some time back, and have printed out on a few occasions. I've witnessed some quite startled reactions, from disbelief, to "you made all this up" accusations to, "wow, I never knew that".

Here they are - a comprehensive (but undoubtedly incomplete) list:

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(1) "The greater part of the Commission's findings "are untrue"...

“The Commission's co-chairs said that the CIA the White House "obstructed our investigation". Indeed, they said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements".

"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."

"It's almost a culture of concealment, for lack of a better word. There were interviews made at FAA's New York Center on the night of 9/11 and those tapes were destroyed. The CIA tapes of the interrogations were destroyed. The story of 9/11 itself, was distorted and was completely different from the way things happened".

"At some level of the government, at some point in time… there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened".

all the above from John Farmer, Senior Counsel, 9/11 Commission.

(2) " I don't believe for a minute we got everything right - that the Commission was set up to fail, that people should keep asking questions about 9/11, and that the 9/11 debate should continue". 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton

(3) "Lee and I write in our book that, uh, we think that the Commission was set up to fail. Because we had, um, not enough money, we didn't have enough time. We had been appointed by the most partisan people in Washington, the leaders in the House and the Senate" 9/11 Commission co-chair Thomas Kean

(4) Former Sen. Tom Daschle said:

"Vice President Cheney requested (him) that there be no investigation into the 9/11 attacks".

(5) "There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn't have access . . . ." 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey

(6) "There's something very sinister going on here... something desperately wrong... This involved what is right now the covering up of information that led to the deaths of 3,000 people".

and “I am appalled that the DoD IG would expect the American people to actually consider this a full and thorough investigation”.

Rep. Curt Weldon

(7) "[NORAD] lied to the American people, they lied to Congress and they lied to your 9/11 Commission...the most gross incompetence and dereliction of responsibility and negligence". Sen. Mark Dayton, Member, Senate Committee on Armed Services and Homeland Security.

(8) "...the [9/11] investigations that have been done so far as more or less cover-up and no real explanation". Rep. Ron Paul, Vice Chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee.

(9) "We purposely put together a staff that had, in a way, conflicts of interests". 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman

(10) "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting". 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer

(11) "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9/11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up".

and... “At some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened".

(13) A document discovered in the National Archives shows that, in a memo to the 9/11 Commission’s chairman and vice-chairman on false statements made by NORAD and FAA officials about the failure of US air defenses, the commission’s Executive Director Philip Zelikow failed to mention the possibility of a criminal referral. This supports allegations that Zelikow “buried” the option of a criminal referral by the commission to the Justice Department for a perjury investigation.

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I think it's time to make a bunch of copies and re-distribute - after all, its the 10th anniversary of what DRG called a "571 page lie", and a "national disgrace". It was clearly just that...and the corporate media still refer to it as "the definitive account" of what happened that day ?/!!

Titled “Today’s Rising Terrorist Threat and the Danger to the United States,” the report, released in conjunction with the Bipartisan Policy Center, is meant to map out the progress and continued shortcomings of America’s anti-terrorism policy. It spends more ink on the latter than the former. The authors seem particularly unsparing with Congress.

The legislative branch just doesn’t seem to get oversight right, as Kean and Hamilton see it. The authors note that in 2004, they were astonished to learn that the Department of Homeland Security reported to 88 committees and subcommittees of Congress.

“Incredibly,” they write, “Congress over the past ten years has increased this plethora of oversight bodies to 92.”

Kean and Hamilton recommend that Congress reduce the number of committees with jurisdiction over DHS, or simply empower one primary authorizing committee.

Finally, the authors urge Congress to get more involved (not less) in litigating the war on terror. The 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force needs to be updated, they argue, “to track the evolution of the terrorist threat.” Kean and Hamilton express skepticism that that authorization was legally sound for dealing with the rise of ISIS in Iraq. But the need for a new legal foundation is about more than just emerging threats in the Middle East.